Michael Jacobs on The Andes

Your first book is by Christopher Isherwood, The Condor and the Cows: A South American Travel Diary.

Modern travel books on South America are so scarce and generally cliché-ridden that it is wonderful to find one so fresh, funny and perceptive as Christopher Isherwood’s beautifully written The Condor and the Cows. Isherwood, curiously enough, had no desire to write this book (he was commissioned by his American publishers), and developed a general distaste for the continent, and for the Andes in particular, which he found claustrophobic and gloomy. The book is appropriately sarcastic, curmudgeonly and iconoclastic, in a way that prefigures Paul Theroux’s Patagonian Express. Yet, whereas Theroux has little of interest to say about the Andes (his whole attitude towards the mountains was determined by altitude sickness), Isherwood shows continual curiosity in the politics, culture and history of the countries he goes through. In Ecuador, for instance, he goes out of his way to meet the leading Ecuadorean painter Guaysamin, and finds him a charismatic person who had begun to inspire an indigenous cultural revival. Many of Isherwood’s political judgments are very pertinent today. And he got the Incas absolutely right.

How?

He recognised the greatness of Inca civilisation without in any way idealising it, as do so many other writers. The Incas were as bloodthirsty as the Spaniards, and no less brutally imperialistic; and, as with the similarly romanticised Muslim civilisation in Spain, their downfall was greatly assisted by internal dissent. I think that Isherwood would have been in agreement with many of the views of the Peruvian novelist Mario Vargas Llosa, who attributes to the Incas the gloomier side to his nation’s character, and who is critical of such present-day political correctness as replacing a statue of Pizarro in Lima’s main square with an entirely bogus Inca flag (the Incas, of course, never had a flag). Isherwood himself memorably characterised the Incas in terms of ‘Much ritual, little spirituality. Much gold, little elegance. Much feasting, little fun.’

And now John Hemming’s The Conquest of the Incas.

Though I’m reluctant to promote a book covering such an endlessly written-about subject, this work remains unrivalled as a vivid, readable and detailed account of Andean history. The story of how a small group of Spanish soldiers manage after 1532 to destroy a civilisation is an undeniably fascinating one, and still difficult fully to grasp. The blind Bostonian historian William Hickling Prescott, in his History of the Conquest of Peru, told the same story with considerably panache, but did not have access to all the chronicles and massive archival material that Hemming had. Nor did he have Hemming’s firsthand explorer’s knowledge of South America. Hemming, though a persuasive chronicler of Westerners’ destruction of South America (he has subsequently devoted his attention to the Amazonian rain forest), is also a rigorously objective historian keen to separate fact from fiction, and capable of creating memorable rounded portraits of the conquistadors. He has, as well, a novelist’s eye for detail, such as his description of the way the Spaniards led by Pizarro were literally pissing themselves with fear when they first confronted the Inca emperor Atahualpa (a detail delicately omitted by Prescott).

Your next book is Patagonia by Chris Moss.

Why haven’t I chosen Bruce Chatwin’s In Patagonia, you may ask! Once you read this you’ll know why. While Chatwin’s book is a memorable stylistic achievement, it gives remarkably little idea of what Patagonia is actually like and concentrates on the most hackneyed aspects of the region’s history. He also convinced thousands of readers that Patagonia was a place few people visited or wrote about, a bizarre and mysterious region inhabited by the desperate, the mad and the Welsh.

Chris Moss’s book is a necessary reminder that Patagonia has inspired more and better travel books than almost any other part of South America, and that it is now a heavily commercialised region. One of Signal Books’ excellent ‘Landscapes of the Imagination’ series, the book is even more remarkable for having been entirely rewritten after Moss experienced every author’s greatest nightmare – the stealing of his computer.

Provocative, thought-provoking and brilliantly insightful on authors such as Theroux and Chatwin (‘dated and dusty’), Moss’s Patagonia dwells on every conceivable aspect of the region, from the French philosopher Baudrillard’s stay in Ushuaia to the pioneering aviation exploits of Saint-Exupéry. One of the chapters brilliantly evokes the terrors of night flying in one of the windiest corners of the world.

Why was anyone flying around in the turbulent skies out there?

Flying was a wonderful way of exploring some of the more inaccessible areas of Patagonia (such as the vast ice field known as the Hielo Patagonico); and planes were essential for the bringing of post to such major centres of the wool trade as Punta Arenas, which had a large European community, despite its isolated position ‘at the end of the world’. The very dangers of flying in Patagonia were also a draw to such notorious daredevils as the First World War German spy and adventurer Gunther Pluschow, who had a fatal crash here after his plane’s rudder went out of control.

Your fourth book is Hugh Thomson’s The White Rock: An Exploration of the Inca Heartland.

I try to read every travel book that appears on South America, and most are either lightweight, superficial, gung-ho or pseudo-spiritual, with tales of visits to shamans and mystical experiences in front of Inca stones.